Dancing Squid

A new artist has joined your party...

This Mortal Coil's staff is expanding despite our lack of budget. We have a new comic artist named Olivia Wylie, and she'll be...

Just kidding.

April Fools!

I know, don't trust anyone over 30 (I fall in that camp).

But, Olivia Wylie is the author of this cross over comic between my character Kamiko and her character Baxtana from her comic Parmeshen.

What is this cross over business all about?

Over on the forums and FB page for Webcomic Underdogs, I joined in on an April Fools community project.

From the forum post:

Your mission is to create a page of your own comic, with your characters interacting in the universe of your assigned comic, and publish it on April 1st.

I was paired up with Olivia and we made our cross-over comics.

If you go to Parmeshen's site you can her take on my character/world, which is just... the real world but where all the gods, spirits, and monsters we believe in are real.

Do you like rich world building comics?

Then you should check out Parmeshen!

To prepare for the cross-over comic, I went and read through part of the archive. I highly recommend starting from the beginning.

Yeah, there's a lot of comics there and it's text heavy.

Olivia's done a lot of worldbuilding that's told through the two main characters (Arik Bijo and Baxtana). She told me that a lot of the work is inspired from the Romani Dom and Bedouin (for Baxt's story).

I've read through the first year's worth of comics. It's an interesting take on fantasy storytelling, in that it's a bit more slice-of-life (one of my favorite genres), and I feel that it's fine if the characters are just sitting around conversing and exploring each other's cultures and backgrounds. There is a lot of depth there, especially from Baxt. There's discussions on language, mythology, and even the social dynamics between the various peoples that live in Viran City. There's a nice set of maps of their world as well.

What's up with the dancing squids?

That's what's up. Yeah, that guy is dead, but, as I understand it, the salt from the soy sauce causes his muscles to spasm and hence it looks he's taking one last shot for freedom before you eat him.

I've been to Japan twice but I haven't had that before. I'd love to try it. I'll eat anything once, because you know... we're at the top of the food chain.

See you Wednesday for our regularly scheduled page of This Mortal Coil.